I Should Not Be Given Time Off...

Time off? Oh yeah, sure, sounds fuckin' great. Hook me the fuck up. Let me roam around with nothing but spare time on my hands. I'm positive that I can keep myself occupied. I mean, I got a pile of movies to watch, and hey, I downloaded all those episodes of tv shows that are on too late for me to watch, right? Shit, man, eleven days will go by like greased lightning, or like Clay Aiken's career.

That was what I thought.

The fact of the matter is, it takes roughly one and one half days for me to suffer from the stir crazies. If I don't have the prospect of going to work where I have something that can keep me busy for no less than eight hours, I start to hear things. I start to drink excessive amounts of caffeine, which serves no purpose but to make me hyperactively irritating. I am aware of this happening, and I take steps to 'nip it in the bud' but it don't work.

I mean, early on in the week I started retraining myself on website design. And then I switched tracks to Flash (I apologize to those of you who clicked on the previous blog's link ... I am learning, and much like when I was learning Photoshop and went apeshit with bevel/emboss and drop shadows, it'll be some time before I discover a happy medium between crass artistic style and weird ideas). I read four books, watched a half a dozen movies. Some of those movies were the same movie four times in a row. I played an awesome video game called Uplink; you play a hacker working for a company, and you hack computers and shit. It is so much fun and such an amazing waste of time that I was forced to delete it from my computer after I spent all my time robbing banks rather than follow the plot line --- there I was, at two am in the morning, wigging out from caffeine and chocolate, yelling at my computer because there was no fucking way that that bank could have possibly tracked my bounces, I fucking deleted everything.

Now it's worse. Now I don't want to do anything, except possibly complain about how I have nothing to do. My mother, god bless her twisted heart, blithely suggests time and again that I do laundry, or tidy up my room, or go for a walk or fix my work boots (for some reason I can't figure out, they smell exactly like moldy cat piss after a bad day of rain). If I wanted to do something worthwhile, I'd find a job that pays more than nine bucks an hour. Worthwhile tasks have the maximum amount of impact on my surroundings, but the minimul amount of personal satisifaction. I don't get off on saying 'Look at me, I'm a tidy person' or 'Wheee! Isn't laundry fun?'. Laundry is a chore, and by chore, I mean trial. The only way it could get any worse was if I was forced to do it while in stocks. I'm just enough of a bourgeoisie cockass to pay my mother to do my laundry for me and to feel guilty about it.

Yes, I am aware that there are people out there the opposite of me, that they can, in fact, keep themselves happy and occupied for any length of time without going nuts and eating an entire refridgerator from top to bottom (I stopped at the olives, though, 'cuz those things are fucking repellant). I imagine they have quite a nice time on their vacations, visiting friends and relations, sitting at beautiful quayside coffee shops enjoying their lattes and their scones, or just wandering around their own homes so blissfully pleased with their lives that they don't see me coming at them with a kitchen knife until it's too late.

Surely, EvilMister, you are lying!

No. I'm not. That is why in the last ten years, I have never taken a vacation purely for the purposes of not doing anything. Every two weeks off I have taken either involves me moving somewhere or helping someone move. The majority of my vacation time has either been used up for sick days, to supplement weak paychecks, or lost in the vast machinery of corporate america. I am firmly convinced that in order to enjoy any vacation, I will need to not be in Canada, and even then there's a risk; I wonder how accomodating the local polizia in, oh, say, Cancun would be to a large naked man running down the streets screaming his head off because he's got nothing to do. (I won't do that here, because you don't piss where you sleep, and I figure if I'm going to lose it in a foreign country, I might as well have Indecent Exposure added to the charges. I think that would take the bite out of being arrested, and would make the story fun for the whole family.)

In short, kids, time off doesn't suit me well.

checkit

soon to be.....

Puberty, Again?

Just when I think it's safe to start enjoying my growing dementia, to be able to settle into some kind of rhythm where nothing irritates the piss out of me, I suddenly discover that, much like when I was a young kid suffering from mystery boners (if you can tell me why walking past a mailbox would ... you know ... ), my body is going through changes again.

Apparently it's related to this malady known as 'getting older'. I think it's cockrot. It's a conspiracy, but I haven't been able to nail down any single source that dictates commands.

What, exactly, is my problem? Oh, I'll tell you. Don't you worry.

The other day I am shaving my three day growth off. I am using the most excellent, indeed, the most venerable of all shaving equipment out there. Armed with the Mach 3 Turbo (a blade so sharp that you could fight off a horde of ninjas with no time and still have enough resilience left over to carve your initials in stone) and the latest in shaving cream technology (I'm told NASA uses this stuff in place of grease, it's so slick), I have no doubts at all I can conquer my facial hair. After all, I've used it only once so far, and on way less stubble. It should've been like lightsaber through arm time.

Was it? Was I like the guy in the commercial, who just swipes that fucking Mach 3 Turbo razor across his face like it was nothing? Did I leave a clean sweep of baby-fine skin ready for the stroking by the hot women?

No. Not at fucking all.

I wept like a baby, and that was about it. My trusty Mach 3 Turbo had failed. I had stubble left behind, and where there wasn't stubble, there was razor burn.

I immediately accused my folks of using my phenomenally overpriced shaving equipment to scrape grout off the bathroom walls. It was either that or some mysterious entity was intentionally dulling my razor blades. Both ideas are equally probable in my household, seeing as how it's built over a Nexus of Increasingly Random Weirdness. I was, perhaps, irrationally pissed off, because I hate shaving to begin with. If it was up to me, I'd look like Grizzly motherfucking Adams, but the job demands it.

And that was when my folks explained to me that when a guy gets older, his facial hair turns into carbon-spun fibers. (They didn't say that, they just said it gets harder, but being the geek I am, I think the above sounds way cooler.) This is also why, they announced, most guys over thirty generally have some kind of beard. Not because they like the hair, but because they'd otherwise have a face like grated cheese.

I'll be honest and say that I don't particularly care much for having a beard either, though my insane perfectionism causes me to strive to new heights of careful architecture with it's shape; I just hate shaving more. So when I find out that, suddenly, my facial hair has the tensile strength of spidersilk, I have even less liking for it.

So here's a growing list of shit that happens when you get 'older':

1. You can hardly stay awake past nine o'clock. There might be shit worth watching, but you couldn't be bothered.
   
2. You can't drink nearly as much as you used to. It's a fact. Oh, you can consume as much as you used to, possibly twice as much. You should just expect that when the morning comes you'll find yourself in the hospital having your stomach pumped.
3. Tying your shoes is something you only do when you have to. I suggest you buy some kind of Vans or other skateshoes, tie them tightly, then slip them on. It works great for me, and this way, no one stares at you and your fuzzy bunny slippers.
   
4. Back hair. It happens. It is gross, and it isn't easy to wax off. (Long story, the short of which I now have a suspiciously close understanding of what it is to give birth)
5. The tendency to say 'When I was young' and actually have the history to back it up.
   
6. Suspicious bruising. It's life's way of reminding you that, a thousand years ago, you'd have been called 'Elder' and everyone is waiting for you to die so they can all move up a rank.
7. Ear hair. I don't have this yet, but it's on the way.
8. Nose hair. Much like beard hair, this stuff grows as fast as you can pluck it out. And the older you get, the farther back into your skull it is. I swear to God I pulled one out the other day and I lost a patch of hair on the back of my neck. That, and my eyes watered up like I was crying.
   

This list is by no means complete, but I am sure in the convening years, I'll have more to add.

So maybe it's not actually puberty, maybe it's the opposite of puberty, but faced with the above, is it any wonder most guys start dating women half their age and buy replacement penises from BWM?

Thank Fucking God---warning! LONG post.

Holy Shit.

If your boss ever comes to you and says that he/she/it has an idea for you to have some extra time off for the holidays, and all that it really entails is 'just a few' 10 hour days, seriously consider jamming a fork into your neck or figuring out how to generate wormholes with your mind before you answer.

Why?

Because on paper, eight hours of overtime looks easy like the pie. Mathmeticians and philosophers will nod sagely at the proposed plan, occasionally taking out a slide rule or Aristotle's tomes to determine the fine points, and then say "Looks good to me" before fucking off to the pub, leaving you to deal with the 'plan'. (This is not a plan whipped up by Hannibal, and he will not say, when all is said and done, that he loves it when a plan comes together. This is a plan designed in hell, with mid-level government cheeseheads for the sounding board.)

Oh sure, at first, I was all for it. I mean, new guy, tryin' to look good, tryin' to impress everyone. Extra money's good, few extra days off even better! Shit yeah, I said. Ten hours? Let's do twelve. I can do this shit standing on my fucking head. Bring it on, cockmonkeys, and we'll see who's left standing. Me EvilMister! Me Destroy All!

That was me for the entire first week. I ruled that goddamn place. With my newfound health and physical propserity growing in leaps and bounds, I busted my hump like it was the only hump left that needed breaking. I turned into some kind of idiot savant (like the ones on TV, you know? The ones who can model your head in Cheese-Inna-Tube after looking at you for two seconds, or who can, shit, I dunno, recite the Star Spangled Banner in anagrams). I beat all previous records for bag sealing. This might not sound like much, but I did over eight hundred bags in ten hours, and at the end of it, my fingers had swollen to the size of sausages.

And then people started calling in sick. Or rather, 'sick'. Like, sorry boss, but I drank an entire liquour store and I think I'm dying sick or I got to do some Xmas shopping, boss, achew!

Fuck 'em, I said. I am EvilMister. There is not the job I cannot do (unless I get fired from it) or the torture invented that can stop me! Lo and tremble, puny mortals! A man with an ego the size of Illinois walks among you!

Now, now I gotta slow it down for a moment, and clue you in to some things that were happening around this time.

• ChronicSmoker admits to everyone who looks at him that he a) is on medication, b) has another personality inside of him and c) 'belongs there'. He frequently lets everyone know that his mental health doctor can't find out why his (Chronic's) eyes are permanently dilated. He also likes to tickle people, and I had to threaten him with the whole 'bloody stump' schtick before he got the message to leave me alone. He has since moved on to other people, and it's goddamned hilarious when it ain't me. Also, and this is most important, so pay attention, when I get tired and frustrated, ChronicSmoker sounds just like Beeker from the Muppet Show at a space of ten feet and beyond. Yeah, that's right. I'm filling and sealing bags, he's down the other end, throwing them as best he can, and every single fucking time he opens his mouth it sounds like he's shouting "MEEP! MEEP! MEE-MEEEEP! Meeep MEEEEP Meeep Junior!" It got to the point where I started working three times as hard with the sincere hope that he'd pass out from the exertion. I pointed this fact out to JuniorHumper, and he has started shouting MEEP MEEP MEEEEP everytime ChronicSmoker starts bleating into the ether, while I mutter quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) that if the fucking retard doesn't shut his piehole, I will for sure shove him in the giant mixer and make ChronicSmoker goo. Seriously. If (and I'm hoping the boss will tell him to go to hell), if ChronicSmoker is picked back up after the New Year, I will either be guilty of manslaughter and thrown in jail or knocking on your doorstep, lookin' to lay low for a few days. Get that cot ready.
• We decided to forego cleaning the machines in an effort to maintain maximum production. Again, this made sense like 1+1=2. (Never mind that it wound up being something like 1+Buick=roadkill). We had to fill nineteen trucks in two weeks. There was me to do the bulk of this work, 'cuz everyone else had other duties, and we were down at least two people per day for a week. I may not have mentioned it, but our prime packaging product is Surimi, and it has a lot in common with sand. If there is a crack, it will lodge there, which is why I'm glad I wear coveralls. Unlike sand, though, this cockfucking shit doesn't simply wash away with water. Noooooo, it has phosphates in it, which draws moisture from the air, and sugars, which takes that freshly drawn water and turns into cement. This is bad enough during regular hours. It becomes compounded when the bosses decide to pressure wash the floors above the machine without first determining whether or not there are, ummm, holes in it through which water can fall, firstly all around the exterior and finally right into the machine's various storage areas. This happened several times, in secret. More than once I had to literally chip and hack my way through a dense iceberg-like pile of gooey white shit to free hyrdraulics or augers, sometimes taking as much as half a day to do so. It was around this time I started prevailing upon my employers to let me clean the machine properly, as the mess was beginning to affect my productivity. I was told to 'sort it out', which translated into 'fuck off, you peon, and fill bags so I can get richer'. This endless blizzard of crud fouled up the works so badly that the metal detector, which is a part of the entire unit, became glued open, so that every time I filled a bag, half a kilo would fall into an overflow bin that normally takes two weeks to fill. The conveyor belts, allegedly sped up to beat Speed Racer X's ass, started to moan and wobble as the actual rotor system almost doubled in size. The floors began to look like the concrete outside Granvill Skytrain station, because the crud sticks to the bottom of your feet until it hits something wet, then falls off, then dries out, then becomes part of the floor.
  
• I get caught by Quality Control scraping an inch and half thick plating of sugared phospates from the bottom of my boots with a knife that typically comes in contact with product. After a five minute conversation that should have last two seconds, I realize this is a bad idea, and that it is now my responsibility to clean the knife. Later, I pry a piece of wood from a broken skid and begin to use this as my boot scraper, and I start intentionally leaving massive piles of crap everywhere I can.
  
• I witness ChronicSmoker, toothless, sucking on chocolates and decide that if he touches me again, I will kill him with a grapefuit spoon.
  
• My finger gets a little nick in it that becomes so infected that it starts to look like an eye and it takes sheer, agonizing pain for me to realize maybe I should disinfect it.
  
• I learn that my foreman RodgerDodger is oddly ... twisted. I will never be the same after watching him liberally apply lubricant to some bracing plates that hold the end of the auger in position, with his middle finger no less. He tells me that 'Too much is not enough", and to this day, I can't do the same chore without feeling depressingly perverted.
• I can now effectively mimic the accents of all three QC guys (two Iranians and a guy from some UK country) and the mixer (also Iranian) with such skill that they all laugh their asses off.
  
• For those of you who read the conversation about 'pud', I know understand the whole of it. One of the Express Retards, a guy I'll call GI Jane (not real army, but cadets, and if you wanna push his buttons, point out to him that cadets isn't the army, and he goes apeshit.) came to fill in for a day. Scullerymaid had already witnessed GI Jane 'pulling his pud' and I just naturally assumed that it was, you know, .... gentlemanly ... adjustment ... because of the coveralls. This is not, I repeat, not the case. I saw him do it. He ... he ... reached ... out and um ... grabbed hold one handed and gave the General a firm, healthy yank. Then he did it again. GI Jane, once a permanent fixture at my new job, also spent some time explaining to me that he proposed to his girlfriend, which didn't seem too strange until I also learned that he'd never seen her before the other day. Then I found out he got her pregnant sometime during the first two days.
  

So while all this is going on, the bosses are going bugnuts because there is no fucking way we're going to meet end of year quota, because they were dumb enough to bank on people turning into robots. We've got people calling in sick, one dude just decides he doesn't wanna do anything anymore, and a homicidal maniac filling bags. They (the bosses) come out, rattle some chains, piss everyone off, then hide in the office again, waiting for one of us to fuck up.

Fast forward to day before yesterday.

I am cranky. I mean, really cranky. And whiney, too. I haven't been sleeping properly, and when I do close my eyes, I start hearing ChronicSmoker's voice. I've been eating a lot of chocolate at work (the clients send good chocolates, by the way, the expensive kind) and drinking about a gallon of pepsi a day. I am wired for sound, and I can hear the molecules in the air grinding against one another. I am a cunt hair away from killing ChronicSmoker because the more irritated we all become, the more he seems to need to push our buttons (I'm sure it's his meds). The machine hasn't been working all that well; things have become so gummed up that I have had to learn how to calculate the necessary variance in the scale system to account for the wildly fluctuating difference in actual vs. measured weights, and apply this calculation every fifth bag. Then I discovered that I had to pause every tenth bag to allow the demons inside the machine to take a quick breather.

All the while, the conveyors are squeaking, groaning and rattling, the air is buzzing, and I am complaining to myself. Why? Because I know north from northwest, is why, and I knew that, at four o'clock, there were still two batches worth of bags out there, and the next day was wash day. The actual conversation with myself started at three thirty. It went something like this...

... I swear to fucking God, I am taking this piece of shit machine apart at four thirty. How can that not be a good idea? It's a great idea. This fucking machine, oh man, do I hate it, why won't they let me clean it. Jesus. I hate ChronicSmoker. These fuckers wouldn't even be this close to the end without me, they better hire me. If they ask me to do one more bag, I'm gonna lose it, I'll start to cry or something, I know it, and then I'll have to kill everyone. No. I won't do another bag. I'll tell the boss I'm dismantling my machine at four thirty and he can go to Hell for all I care. I'm the greatest thing that's happened here, and they're making me crazy. I'm gonna ask for eleven dollars an hour and if they don't give it to me they can go fuck themselves, I don't need this shit ...

This is cyclical, repeating itself in three minute intervals.

So, at ten after four, the hopper runs dry and I hurry up the stairs quickly to double-check that the machine is, in fact, done.

Only to see RodgerDodger, my foreman, hanging another tote.

"What are you doing?" I wail. I literally wail. I sound like a four year old girl who can't have a pony for her birthday, except I am easily two hundred and thirty pounds.

"Hanging another tote. Why. What's wrong?"

"I wanna take the machine apart."

"Can't. Boss wants us to finish all the batches by five thirty."

"Oh, mmmmmmmmaaaaaaannnnnnnnnn. Really?"

"Well, whatever you don't finish, we will. Come on, man, you can do it. You're awesome!"

I know I'm awesome. But I'm still seriously considering whether or not to throw a tantrum on the floor, or if maybe I should bust out a quivering lip. I decide that since I am, in fact, awesome as well as cool, I won't do either. What I will do is exactly what is expected of me, but so fast that they won't even realize I'm done until I'm on my way home. Which is what I did. But not before pointing out to RodgerDodger that I wasn't, under any circumstances, doing anything else. Surprisingly, he didn't tell me to go fuck myself.

Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you about what happens to the air circulation system when we don't clean for two weeks, and in specific what can occur when cloth filters get coated in three inches of surimi and then struck with a pressure.

In short, motherfuckers, thank fucking God I didn't have to go to work this morning. You would have heard about the grisly murders all the way to Beijing. I'd be known as Red Santa...

Christmas? Kissm'ass.

Lemme tell ya something about Christmas.

Xmas music. Holy fuck. This stuff drives me insane. I swear to God there's only five or six songs, and then every 'musical artist' since the dawn of fucking time has taken time out of their busy schedules to whip up their own friggin' version. Which, in and of itself, isn't that bad, but when the motherfuckers who like Xmas music start playing this shit starting the middle of November, then it's out of goddamned control. In my experience, these people are the sort of mercilessly cheerful, Xanaxed to the eyeball nutjobs who crochet their own toilet seat covers and firmly believe that Elvis was Jesus and vice versa. You know the ones I mean. They wear the reindeer/Santa/Elf hat with the Mistletoe/jingle bells/flashing Grand Mal lights, wish you Merry Christmas/Joyous Noel/Season's Greetings with the kind of forcefulness you'd generally only find in guys who spend their time carving Swastikas into their foreheads. They're on their third copy of the christmas cd where cat meow Deck the Halls and Silent Night because they play it year round. I'm talking Fruitcake eating, Eggnog swilling, Mistletoe carrying Militant Christmas-ites. They work mostly at Walmart, but can also be found places like Penningtons, Spensers and K-Tel Records and Tapes. I hate them. But mostly because Christmas jingles get stuck in my head like they've been cemented in there with Krazy Glue, and they are the prime source of contagion.

Seriously. One minute of the First Noel and I'm fucking stuck. It's me, hollering out Jingle Bells and Here Comes Santa Claus at the top of my lungs for the rest of the day. And I sing intentionally badly, because not only can I not sing, I sing poorly naturally. We're talking multi-frequency cat fight. We're talking Peter Brady going through puberty bad. And the weirder the look, the louder I do it, and let me tell you something, when you sing loud enough that you can actually drown out a mixer the size of a luxury sedan mixing two and a half thousand kilos of crud, that's loud. The only thing seperating me from the aforementioned Christmas Fucktards is the silly goddamn hat, which frightens the living hell out of me.

So if the next time you see me, I'm wearing a flashing pin that says 'Kiss Me, I'm one of Santa's Elves', am dressed head to toe in bright red felt and singing Jingle Bell Rock on a corner, desperately trying to get the money up to feed my Misteltoe jones, be kind, drop a dime.

Dammit! Who Do I Have To Kill To Have My Weekends Left Free?

Not to toot my own horn, which I could do if I wanted to because I'm me, but right now, I am working very, very hard. I am doing ten hours a day at Ye Olde Spice Plante (the added e's make it olde fashioned) in order to guarantee a few extra days off at the end of the year. A 25 kilo bag doesn't weigh too much at the start of the day, but when ya hit hour nine, those motherfuckers weigh as much as the goddamned pyramids. Except pyramids are nominally easier to carry because they don't bend in the fucking middle when you pick 'em up. Needless to say, I am tired and I am sore, and I spend an hour on the bus on the way home listening to hormone-riddled teenagers shout at each other across a space of said bus; all I want is to be left the fuck alone.

I want to be left alone at the best of times. Christmas day? Ho-ho. Merry Xmas, these are my gifts, these are yours, I love you all very much, see you in time for dinner, don't call me, I won't call you. When I am cranky, I'm like a turbocharged asshole machine, and since I'm louder than anyone else in my family by at least a factor of five, when I shout, fucking Spain hears.

Now my mother, Momzilla, is on this ... renovation ... jag. Has been for months, but until recently, I was spared the fallout from too much Trading Spaces because there were other areas in the house that needed work. And since she's a dying breed (a housewife, of all the antiquated and outmoded concepts in this new age), there's a shitload of time during each day in which to design multifarious ways to fuck me over.

Awhile back, Momzilla saw this show in which one of the people was one of those guys who likes to see what he owns. His house wasn't messy, per se, but it was well-lived in. The designer on the show started riposting with some kind of factual proof that people like this have a mild form of brain damage, and it's imperative that they don't dismiss this fact when designing their stuff. Lo and behold, Momzilla realises EvilMister is just such a guy hisself.

Shit, man, I could of told her that twenty fucking years ago. I used to go apeshit, I mean, stark fucking nuts when she'd clean my room while I was at school. It'd take me fifteen minutes to find a pen, because I had memorized the exact spot of the pen, and indeed, every other thing in my room.

It started with shelving in the closet. Which I like. But the process, which invloves a father who can literally spend sixteen hours choosing the proper nails, was a long and painful one, complete with architectural designs that would have flabbergasted Frank Lloyd Wright and horrified my ninth grade english teacher (closet is almost always spelled clost, and it ain't shorthand she's dropping down.) Any and all renovations in my room, small enough to frighten lifers on death row with it's size, involves the removal of all my worldly possessions to 'make room for your father and his tools'. This is a big lie. It's so she can create a list of things I own that she wants me to throw away. I forgot to mention that ever since this episode of 'Demolishing your Home and Making it Over the Way We Want' that explained this guy's ... condition, Momzilla continues to bring up the fact that I, too, 'suffer' from this 'problem'. I've had to point out to her that I am maybe a little too attached to my stuff, but I by no means suffer from narcolepsy or schizophrenia.

That was three weeks ago.

Last week it was bookshelves, to house the massive collection of crap I read. Again, I love the shelves on my walls, because now I can see all the titles, and the shelves themselves are only big enough to have rows one level deep. Anyone out there who is a booklover knows how fucking frustrating it is to have to dig behind two and sometimes three layers to find the one book you want. It can take hours, by which time you've forgotten your own name and the printed word has most likely been replaced by holograms and mental telepathy. Again, I had to remove most of my possessions out of the room. Including my computer. I hate moving my computer. Not because of anything I might be doing on it, but because of cords.

Cords and I don't get along. I can hold three speaker wires in one hand, look away, count to twenty, and find that they've tied themselves into a Gordian Knot by the time I've finished. This is complicated by my supergeek PC surround system, which has more wires coming out of it than anything else I own, and by the fact that my DVD surround wires come right by the PC. It took me half an hour to get everything unsnarled, and then Momzilla reorganized them for me, because my own loops were too loose for her liking. This time, the old man really did take all day. If it weren't for ChubbyMonk coming to rescue me, I'd have staple gunned both M0mzilla and my dad to the walls.

Then there's the coatrack she wanted built. Like the shelves in the closet and the ones on the walls, this came with an attached diagram. The only thing missing were instructions on how to assemble it in all languages known to man. My dad, being eminently logical and far more patient than I am, looked at the design, noted it's salient points, and built it his own damned way. When Momzilla saw the rack, the first thing she said was 'It's not up and down.' ( I should note that my new coatrack is nailed to the wall and has four giant pegs for jackets) She demanded to know why it wasn't how she'd designed it. My poor old dad explained in the weary tones of a foreman (which he has been for twenty-six years) to the architect (who can only think on paper and not in three dimensions) that an up-and-down style coatrack is asking for problems : jackets on top bolt hanging over all other coats, the necessity of digging through said jackets to find the one you want, the massive lump all the jackets would cause, etc. His own design, diagonal, is much more streamlined. I concurred and my mother left the room, still unwilling to admit it made sense.

All I want is to be left alone. I don't want to know about any more design changes to the very structure of space and time in my room, I don't care that my family doctor is now offering Botox shots, I could give a rat's ass that my father doesn't do anything around the house. On the weekends, all I want to do is sit in front of my computer or my television, eating all the shit I don't eat during the week, watching the cheezy shows I download or watching a movie on TV that I own the DVD for (but am way too fucking lazy to pull out of the box). I want to go to Starbucks, drink my Americano and stare at girls half my age. I don't want to be reminded that I need to have my laundry out, I don't need to be reminded rent is due, I have no desire to 'swing by' the grocery store to pick up the eighty-three things that were forgotten because Momzilla hates crowds. I wanna watch adult oriented clips without being ... disturbed. I don't want my massive dog, Bootsy Collins, to be let in to climb all over me because 'she misses me' and Momzilla thinks it's cute.

I wanna be left the fuck alone to do the things I wanna do, and if anyone hassles me next weekend (Sunday is a wash already) I am for sure going to kill someone.

My best friend and moral compass (he lets me know when I'm being too nice) has pointed out that the above will only get worse when I get married. He has pointed out that marriage brings another entire family into the equation, at which point I will find myself spending my weekends visiting relatives, babysitting nieces and nephews, entertaining out-of-town visitors, schlepping my ass to the ends of the earth for this or that, and generally signing away all rights to personal freedom.

There is no light, there is no consolation except for one:

At least in prison, you can stab a screw and get sent into solitary, where they leave you alone.

Conversations at Work

I came into this conversation part of the way through, but was compelled to leap right in ...

SculleryMaid: .... pud ....

EvilMister: Did someone just say pud?

JuniorHumper: What the fuck's a pud?

EvilMister: 's part of the wang. (I indicate my wang area for visual accuracy) You know, short for pudenda.

ForkMan, SculleryMaid: (laughs)

JuniorHumper: What part of the wang?

EvilMister: I dunno, man, 's either the twig or the berries. You know, colonel and two soldiers...

Bookie: (in the change room) FRANK AND BEANS! FRANK AND BEANS!

ForkMan, SculleryMaid: (laughs harder)

EvilMister: (on my way out door, to ForkMan) We are a bunch of fucking grownups, eh?

ForkMan: No shit!

We all laaaaugh and laaaaaugh and laaaaaugh at work.